RICHARD FERNANDEZ: An Evitable Disaster.
“The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War”, according to Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira in Medium is “there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win. … The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent.”
This conquer or die view, unlike Kevin Williamson’s, is not beyond the pale. In fact Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey described the Medium article as a “great read”. The idea that only one side of the political aisle leaves the room while the other is clapped in irons plainly expresses many may have secretly thought except heretofore it was necessary to conceal it. Now the decks are cleared and some are itching to raise the Jolly Roger.
The major problem with this strategy is China, whose relentless competition will penalize all irrational political correctness and all serious division. America can become as dysfunctional as California but China will own it. As David Goldman noted in a speech delivered at Hillsdale College “China is a phenomenon unlike anything in economic history.”
Plus:
The American elite is no longer as it is accustomed to thinking of itself, “the only adult in the room” whose patience with the childish Red states is now at an end, but a fragile civilization hanging on to its advantage by a thread against China. Before the left raises the Jolly Roger they should note the giant war junk bearing down on them fast. America’s sole remaining advantage Goldman notes, is that it is ruled consensually, which is precisely the advantage Leiden and Teixeira intend to surrender. The dilemma for the Left is they can’t indulge their fantasies in the face of a peer competitor any more than an army can divide its forces in the face of the foe. They will need the Deplorables to survive. But they haven’t realized that yet.
Opening the borders to replace the Deplorables won’t work because the replacements won’t be as cooperative as those they are intended to replace. As David Goldman points out a low skilled balkanized population nurtured on gender studies and political correctness won’t save America from the Chinese challenge. . . .
The lesson being administered to Europe, with its stagnation, anomie and political crisis, is that the elites cannot rule without their core populations. The bureaucrats can command no real loyalty from their imported auxiliaries, who at the first default of payoffs will turn on the apparatchiks who will by then have nowhere to appeal for support. Thus the logic of civil war, as proclaimed in the Medium article, is the logic of the fall. This does not change the fact Leyden and Teixeira are probably correct in anticipating what happens next. Someone’s going to go for the brass ring or die trying.
Read the whole thing. May God save America from the fecklessness of its awful political class.
Related thoughts here.
h/t GR